Astar Ambassador Program - Suggestions on Structures and Processes

Astar Initiatives
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Greetings everyone!

Context

This post is aimed at creating a conversation around the Astar Ambassador program. It will also serve to gather feedback and suggestion about it. As the network and team grows, and the processes change to stay competitive and efficient, so too does the need to adapt, adjust and prepare certain Astar initiatives like the Ambassador Program so it can better serve our community.

Since it’s inception, Astar aimed to recognize community members who supported and promoted Astar on a voluntary basis by naming them Ambassadors to the network. Through this voluntary program, the emphasis was always quality over quantity.

Prior to the programs existence, certain community members were acting in the sole best interest of Astar and its growth. We’ve given these OGs the AllStar Ambassador label. We thank them again for the years of contributions and hope to gather their valuable insight and suggestions in this post.

:books: Discussion Topics

To begin I’ll explain certain structures in place that may need to be revisited. To provide more context please see the Astar Flight Club paper. Please note that content of the paper can also be discussed here and suggestions for changes can be made.

:busts_in_silhouette: Ambassador Telegram Group

This private TG group has serves as the main hub of communicate between Ambassadors and core-team. Within it we have team members, OG ambassadors (AllStar), Technical Ambassadors and promoted Ambassadors (ProtoStar). Its purpose is to communicate important news, updates, bugs, opportunities and make special request.

:soap: Astar Flight Club

This was created with the intention of a more open group that spread through word of month to interested folks who were curious about the Astar Ambassador program. Each user would be considered a “Candidate Ambassador” in which they would showcase their skills, content and knowledge of Astar by posting their work. This channel also contains core-team members and current ambassadors who can help answer questions, provide guidance and examples of work. Through tracking activity of the Candidates, we may select certain ones that distinguish themselves from the rest through their persistent contributions and nominate them for ProtoStar Ambassador.

:couch_and_lamp: Astar Discord Ambassador Lounge

The discord is the a frequented place for builders and new users who are looking to for community activities, updates, answers to questions and so on. The lounge serves as a private channel for Ambassadors to communicate and coordinate with the team and each other.

:speech_balloon: Sharing Advice on Project Management & Development

:heart: Notes:

As discussion moves forward, please be aware of the importance of suggesting solutions to any area that you see can use improvements.

Feel free to share examples, sources and data to support changes. In this way we can learn and further elevate the Ambassador program to the stars, collectively.

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To get things started, I do want to suggest some small changes to the TG group. It has grown substantially (and continues to with new team members and ambassadors) and due to this we are seeing an abundance of messages. This leads to difficultly finding important messages and also leads to message fatigue.

I would like to suggest certain parameters that can help. The Ambassador TG group messages should consist of mainly messages from core-team and ambassadors in the following categories:

  • Bugs & troubleshooting questions
  • Important updates to the network
  • Astar opportunities and outreach
  • Special request from core-team
  • Astar Ambassador voting

For sharing of Ambassador contributions (social media content, events, and others), I will suggest using the Astar Flight Club TG as there are likely more candidates there whom are probably more active in general on social media. The Ambassador Lounge in the discord could also serve for sharing of this content so interested team members and other ambassadors could help promote it.

Overall, we have many other channels to share other info and accomplishments, so having one that is aimed at more specific, important messages could serve all well.

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Thank you Ramz for the initiative and good suggestion! I agree with that, the ambassador contributions can be sent to Astar Flight Club TG, so it’s easier to find the important information in the Astar Ambassador TG! About the new ambassadors, I usually just judge by the work he/she had done before, but I also hope that we can discuss and have a consensus about the criteria for electing ambassadors. For instance, should we consider attracting more Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs)? Should we concentrate on expanding into specific markets such as Africa or other regions? Perhaps we could conduct a survey among our current ambassadors to understand their linguistic capabilities and geographical locations. This could potentially allow us to prioritize candidates who represent underrepresented communities.

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I fully support the suggestion to streamline the Ambassador Telegram (TG) group by focusing on specific, important messages only, because sometimes it’s really messy there with all those other channels. Categorizing messages into Bugs & troubleshooting, Important updates, Astar opportunities, Special requests, and Ambassador voting will improve communication efficiency and reduce message overload. Utilizing other channels like Astar Flight Club TG and the Ambassador Lounge for sharing Ambassador contributions is a great idea, as it will engage more active participants. This change will lead to a more organized and effective communication platform for all Astar Ambassadors.

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Thank you so much for this initiative Ramz. Honestly, most times it’s difficult to keep track of the latest happenings in the ambassador TG group due to so many messages.

I sincerely and totally support this motion.

Thanks.

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I agree with this.
My experience in other groups is that they can quickly become noisy channels and then are ignored. Then members will turn to private DMs rather than discussing the ideas openly that could help others.
Save our Ambassador TG group for high-value discussion and ideas that we need to pay attention to.

I’d like to add this to the list above:

  • Sharing Advice on Project Management & Development
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I was recently pondering the past Astar Twitter posts that promoted ambassadors, and it struck me that there might be a more effective way to approach this. I came across an interesting strategy employed by NEAR, where they showcased banners featuring their top 10 influencers (as shown in the attached picture). This approach seems promising, and I believe we could adapt it for Astar’s benefit.

Instead of just promoting ambassadors, we could create similar banners highlighting top-performing ambassadors, content creators, or contributors. To ensure a steady flow of fresh content and maintain engagement, we could opt for a regular cadence, such as weekly or it might be better for us to do this only bi-weekly or monthly.

What’s even more exciting about this approach is its potential to attract Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) from the Polkadot ecosystem. By showcasing their contributions and content related to Astar, we can offer them a platform for greater exposure and recognition. This way, we not only promote ambassadors but also foster collaborations and interactions with influential figures in the Polkadot community.

Overall, this approach seems like a win-win situation. It not only highlights the efforts of our dedicated ambassadors but also fosters connections with external KOLs, ultimately leading to increased visibility and growth for Astar.

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100% yes, love this idea and it I’ve also seen it! Its a great way to identify and create KOLs from our groups of Ambassadors.

Note: Lets take a simple vote/poll on these measures as well in this thread. I propose if we get 10 or more positive votes we should move forward with these initiatives.

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agree with the idea. sorting the flow of information will always be useful when a subsequent search is required.

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Great! Collaborating with KOLs is a good way to keep growing and to give more diffusion to Astar.

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Really great idea @0xRamz , sometimes that we are too noisy and we missed important messages on our TG private.

Also with @Matt 's idea, I favour this also, as it will more engage community members since every ambassador is unique and each has different special skillset.

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Actually I like the idea, having a TG group one for everything can be overfilled with non related messages. Discord could be a great solution for that ( including livestreams and project presentations).
@Matt It’s a really nice idea ! Having a sort of “competitive” system can help to see the involvement and the interest of the ambassadors , I will like to give it a try :grin:

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One idea about the airlyft campaign, we can do campaign with the projects in Astar eco or partnership, like Neurolancher, Astar Degens, and partnership with Near together? Maybe we can have WASM NFT collection for it as well

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Ok , here is my 2 cents:

We need BIG names in the Ambassador Program. Astar Ambassador Program needs to be transformed to a club of elite contributors.

  1. Exclude all not active people, 3 month no contributions , excluding. If they ask to return, return them .

2.Invitation of amazing Ambassadors and Contributors. Individual work with good contributors inside and , the main thing, - outside Polkadot ecosystem. Now we need real representatives who can promote Astar in different entities , companies , and governments. Serious people, not students and teenagers only. Not only content makers and admins, but more like business developers and leaders who can influence some group of people.

  1. @sota is active in Japan, lets try to involve ambassadors from the entities, who will represent their organizations, companies, governments, and communities inside the Astar ecosystem to the Ambassadors Program. We can do the same work in Europe, Americas, Asia. We need ambassadors who can invite high value contributors, not masses only. The perspective for these people needs to be significant . It’s not an easy task and it needs to be valued adequately.

We need to make things easy and smooth , and not to be greedy.

1.Do you want to organize the ordinary event , here is the framework , do preparations, show us, get the approve, do the event , prove the efficiency get your reward. Here is Polkadot framework - Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

It works good , lets just copy it. Reward for ordinary event - up to 800$, for extraordinary - up to 25K$. Its more than enough. We can make a third option - small event ,no approve for proposal, from 15 up to 25-30 people, 200-300$ compensation for food and drinks, rent the equipment . No checks, headaches, only the photos/videos and proofs in social media as a report.

For the events some bounty budget for 1 year and 3 ambassadors in charge to make decisions about the funds, to vote.

2.Give the ambassadors real power to participate in decision making, especially about funding the activities and adding and removing projects from the programs.

3.Budgets for ambassador activities that can be used without pain, suffering and humiliation.

4.We can do similar frameworks not only for events , but for other activities also, like adding projects to DappStaking , invitation of the projects, business development, administration of the discord , and so on.

Transparent decisions and project development

1.On-chain governance

2.Astar need more professionals with plan , success metrics, and real passion. More grown people in the core team, more 30+ professionals, not only yesterday students with no experience. Hire profi, invite profi, involve profi with profi.

  1. More professionals to the program, less young degens without the ideas and contributions.

  2. Astar Ambassadorship need to be Tier 1 club where you can meet really high quality professionals, do the business, have a good time with likeminded people.

5.There was a talks about the off-line event after COVID for all Astar contributors. Let’s make ambassadors, core partners and core team meet together , have fun, share the ideas, brainstorm.

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I believe that order is best for us. Only important topics should be discussed and quick decisions should be made accordingly. That’s certainly a good suggestion.

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By the way, I composed a form for reimbursement or for cash advance (depends on what you need), to make it easier. Kindly check it here : Astar Community Event Report - Google Sheets

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Totally agree. It’s really hard to check messages from core team / important ones in our TG group like we used to because there are a lot of off-topic messages.

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Fully agree, it would be better to have only important messages in the Amb TG group. Ambassadors should use the other canals (AFC TG group or discord), to promote their work or their project.

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Thanks for all the input everyone. I would go as far to say there some organizational structures we can easily vote on here. Lets keep suggesting and putting votes in this thread as we go. Sort of a living document that guides some aspects of the Ambassador program.

And imo the budget aspect and spends need a bit more research and time. For example, I would like to figure out what Polkadot, and other parachain ambassador programs do when it comes to sponsoring, funding events, merch and such - what works, what doesn’t and so on. I do agree that the process should be easy to understand, provide assurance to both the community and the other ambassadors that its being put to good use. Also, making it accessible to those who care about the growth of the network worldwide, and in a manner we all agree on, especially the foundation where the funds are coming from.

If anyone can bring back info about how its done elsewhere we would truly appreciate it. The more we learn the better.

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:soap: I would like to create a poll to set these parameters for our main TG group. To enforce these parameters we will kindly and collectively remind one another to please share messages that don’t fit these parameters to other social groups (discord, flight club). They will also be deleted by the group mods if they don’t fit the parameters.

Implement the 5 parameters to the main Astar Ambassador TG group?
  • Yes
  • No
  • Abstain
0 voters
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